LOS ANGELES — UCLA needed a major victory as it tries to build its NCAA tournament resume – and it got one. 

The Bruins put up one of their best performances of the season to take down No. 4 Purdue, 69-67, for its first signature win of the season, and a massive one in the Big Ten.

It was all thanks to guard Donovan Dent, who broke out of a rough slump and showed all the reasons that made him such a highly-touted transfer out of New Mexico. UCLA coach Mick Cronin said he spoke with Dent earlier in the week about needing to ‘get in there and throw punches’ after the struggling performances at Penn State and Ohio State.

‘I had a little talk, he listened,’ Cronin said.

Dent picked apart the Purdue defense and was the catalyst in the offensive surge for a team that shot 56.9% from the field, finishing with a game-high 23 points and season-best 13 assists, his first double-double in more than a month.

‘He’s a player of the game,’ said Purdue coach Matt Painter. ‘There’s no question about that.’

While every dime brought out the energy for an electric home crowd, there was one no greater than the final one. With the Bruins down by one point, Dent drew two defenders off a screen that resulted in forward Tyler Bilodeau wide open. Dent dished it out to him and he drilled the game-winning 3-point shot with six seconds left. 

Purdue had a chance to respond and tried to go for the win, but were unable to get the bucket when C.J. Cox’s 3-point shot bounced off the rim and the Boilermakers were unable to secure the rebound.

In a game that honored the legendary John Wooden – who played for Purdue and later was coach at UCLA – Purdue got out to a hot start, flipping the script from its past couple of games; it looked like the Boilermakers would cap off their West Coast trip in perfect fashion with a 12-point lead in the first half. The strong presence of Purdue fans inside Pauley Pavilion drowned out the home crowd.

Then UCLA turned it up a notch. With Dent leading the charge, the Bruins were blocking shots and the offense started knocking down shots, using a 17-5 run in the final seven minutes of the half to go in the locker room tied.

The second half remained close, with the lead and momentum going back-and-forth. But UCLA’s offense remained hot, shooting a whopping 65.2% from the field in the last 20 minutes. Thanks to some key buckets from star guard Braden Smith, Purdue again looked like it was closing in on a win when it grabbed a six-point lead with just under two minutes left. 

However, Purdue couldn’t get more opportunities at the bucket to put the nail in the coffin. Two key turnovers resulted in UCLA baskets to close the deficit, punctuated by Bilodeau’s game-winning shot. UCLA ended the game on an 8-0 run.

It’s a much-needed win for UCLA as its tournament hopes were starting to fade thanks to some tough losses and no big wins on the season; the Bruins entered the night 12-6 with a 1-5 Quad 1 record. The win over Purdue dramatically boosts UCLA’s resume as it tries to live up to preseason expectations it would be a contender in the Big Ten.

Despite the big win, Cronin couldn’t help but throw a slight jab at the Big Ten for UCLA’s start to its conference schedule.

‘I want to thank the Big Ten for giving us five of our first seven on the road, and giving us the team picked to win the league on two days rest,’ he said. ‘I really wanna thank the Big Ten for that.’

Dent and Bilodeau were two of four Bruins that were in double figures. Smith finished with 12 points and four assists for Purdue, with Cox as the team’s leading-scorer with 16 points.

Purdue suffers its second loss of the season, snapping its nine-game win streak. It’s the first road loss for the Boilermakers.

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Jim Harbaugh said at his end-of-the-year press conference that he wanted his next offensive coordinator to be the head coach of the offense. Harbaugh could soon get a former head coach as the Los Angeles Chargers’ offensive coordinator.

The Chargers are closing in on hiring former Miami Dolphins head coach Mike McDaniel as the team’s offensive coordinator, a person close to the situation confirmed to USA TODAY Sports.

ESPN and NFL Network were the first to report the news.

McDaniel is one of the hottest names during this year’s hiring cycle. He’s received interest from multiple teams that have head coach and offensive coordinator vacancies.

The Dolphins fired McDaniel in January after a 7-10 campaign. It was Miami’s second-consecutive losing season. McDaniel compiled a 35-33 record in four seasons as the Dolphins’ head coach. He made the playoffs in his first two seasons in Miami.

McDaniel is regarded as one of the best offensive minds in the NFL. Under McDaniel, the Dolphins led the NFL in total offense in 2023 and quarterback Tua Tagovailoa finished with an NFL-high 4,624 passing yards. Tagovailoa had the best years of his career under McDaniel’s tutelage, but the quarterback has struggled with injuries and inconsistent play. The Dolphins’ offense declined in the past two seasons.

Harbaugh’s decision to hire McDaniel as offensive coordinator is a change from his typical smash-mouth football philosophy. McDaniel comes from the West Coast offense and the Kyle Shanahan coaching tree, but the Chargers head coach said he wants to jump-start what had been an outdated offensive system under recently fired OC Greg Roman.

Follow USA TODAY Sports’ Tyler Dragon on X @TheTylerDragon.

For generations, Indiana football was associated with futility.

Before Curt Cignetti’s hiring after the 2023 season, the Hoosiers had just 13 winning seasons since the moon landing. They had only three bowl wins in their history, the last of which came in 1991. They hadn’t won more than eight games since 1967. Perhaps most notably (and infamously), they had more losses all-time than any other FBS program.

From virtually the moment Cignetti arrived from James Madison and implored everyone to Google him, things have quickly changed. Over the past two seasons, Indiana has gone 27-2, including a 16-0 2025 season that culminated with a 27-21 win against Miami in the College Football Playoff championship game that delivered the program its first national title.

Along the way, the Hoosiers were battling more than just their own woeful history.

College football’s not a sport that’s typically kind to upstarts, with a hardened top caste of elite programs that have the most resources and a disproportionate amount of championships. With its victory Monday, Jan. 19, Indiana became the first first-time champion at the FBS level since Florida in 1996, before everyone on the Hoosiers’ current roster (old as it may be) were born.

Indiana’s triumph is impressive by any measurement, but it also raises a question — who might be the next first-time champion?

Buy IU champoinship books, prints

Here are five potential options:

Who will be college football’s next first-time national champion?

Oregon

The first and only place this list could start is with the team Indiana wiped out in the semifinals on its way to the championship.

Oregon has been painfully and frustratingly close to the sport’s ultimate prize for the past quarter-century, with the plucky underdog from the Pacific Northwest morphing into one of college football’s modern-day juggernauts in that time. The Ducks have made the national championship game twice, losing to Auburn in 2010 and Ohio State in 2014. Under 39-year-old coach Dan Lanning, they’ve gone 48-8 and made the College Football Playoff in each of the past two seasons. With quarterback Dante Moore spurning the NFL draft, they’ll be among the preseason favorites to win the national title heading into next season.

Oregon has seemingly anything a program could desire — national cachet, major-conference membership (and the money that comes with it), a prodigious coach and vast NIL resources thanks in some part to their close connection to Nike and co-founder Phil Knight. Though nothing is ever a guarantee in college football, it seems to be a matter of when, not if, the Ducks win a title.

Texas Tech

Few, if any, schools have embraced the new NIL landscape in college sports quite as effectively as the Red Raiders, whether it’s in men’s basketball, softball or football. With the financial help of billionaire booster Cody Campbell, who was a lineman at the school under the late Mike Leach, Texas Tech brought in one of the best and most expensive transfer hauls last offseason. Thanks to dominant offensive and defensive lines, the Red Raiders won their first Big 12 title and earned a playoff bye.

They’re already running a similar playbook for next season, with top-rated transfer quarterback Brendan Sorsby coming aboard, and as long as Campbell is actively engaged with his alma mater, it’s hard to imagine Texas Tech falling too far off, especially in a wide-open and watered-down Big 12 that should provide a navigable annual path to the playoff.

SMU

Speaking of Texas schools with deep-pocketed boosters who made a fortune in energy, let’s take a look at the Mustangs. SMU has enjoyed a rapid rise going 63-26 over the past seven seasons and moving from the American Conference to the ACC, a jump that was made possible thanks to the university forgoing nine years of ACC television revenue to get an invitation to the league.

The Mustangs have a bright, offensively minded head coach in Rhett Lashlee, who is contractually tethered to the school through the 2032 season. They’ve shown they can make the playoff, having done so in 2024. They’re located in the middle of one of the most talent-rich metro areas in the country. And, of course, it helps to have people willing to dump some of their exorbitant wealth into your program.

Arizona State

The Sun Devils fit the mold of many of the programs on this list. They have a wunderkind coach in Kenny Dillingham, a 35-year-old offensive whiz who seems as well-equipped as any of his colleagues to navigate the sport in the age of NIL and the transfer portal. They’ve recently made the playoff, having done so as the Big 12 champion in 2024. There are demographic factors working in their favor, namely that they’re one of the country’s largest schools located in one of the nation’s largest metro areas.

The most glaring missing piece might be money, something Dillingham addressed last month when he put out a call for $20 million from a would-be donor he said he would make ‘the most famous person in the city.’ If he’s able to get something close to that, watch out, but even without it, he’s got Arizona State in an enviable position.

Wisconsin

The Badgers would have been right there with Oregon on a similar list as recently as five years ago, but they’ve mysteriously struggled under coach Luke Fickell, who was widely hailed a home-run hire four years ago before managing just a 17-21 record thus far.

Still, this is a Big Ten program that was, until recently, one of the sport’s most reliably successful outfits, with 22 consecutive bowl appearances and 10 10-win seasons from 2002-23. Fickell showed his mettle as a coach at Cincinnati, leading the Bearcats to the four-team playoff in 2021 when the program wasn’t in a power conference. It’s quite possible that with more NIL resources, he can get things turned around at Wisconsin.

After all, as Indiana just showed, nothing in this sport is ever out of the realm of possibility.

It’s not often you can take head coaching job in women’s college basketball without relocating, but that’s the ‘exciting’ reality for Arizona State’s Molly Miller.

‘It’s kind of unheard of to go up a level and not have to move homes,’ Miller, who was hired away from nearby Grand Canyon University, told USA TODAY Sports. ‘The fact that my kids could stay in the same school … that was just an amazing opportunity for me. And I feel like the timing was right. The place was right. Arizona State is exploding in athletics … this is the place to be.’

Miller is the latest head coach leading Sun Devils’ athletics to new heights. Kenny Dillingham led Arizona State to the College Football Playoff last season and JJ Van Niel took the women’s volleyball team to back-to-back Big 12 conference titles in 2024 and ’25. And in her first season as women’s basketball coach, Miller has transformed a losing program into a contender.

Arizona State opened the 2025-26 season with a program-best 15 consecutive wins, tying the school record. The Sun Devils beat Kansas last week to improve to 17-2 and 4-2 the Big 12, already better than last season’s 3-15 conference record.

‘I told ’em the other day, I’m like, ‘You’ve already flipped it now. The hard part is sustaining success,” Miller said of her squad’s turnaround. ‘When you’re facing a conference with such parody in any given night, a win or a loss can have March implications. The Big 12 isn’t going to reward potential, it’s going to reward night in, night out, daily grind

‘It is a hard league with a high standard. So you have to have that one-game-at-a-time mentality.’

Buy-in from transfers

Miller joined Arizona State in March 2025 after leading Grand Canyon University — less than 25 miles away — to a 32-3 record and an NCAA Tournament bid. She immediately turned to the transfer portal to rebuild the Sun Devils roster, which returned three players from last year.

From the outside, Arizona State might appear to be a tough sell. The Sun Devils had four consecutive losing seasons and an 11-53 conference record dating back to the 2021-22 season. The program’s last NCAA Tournament bid was in 2019. Yet, Miller had no problem getting players on board with her vision to create a winning culture.

‘There’s an authentic way to get buy-in, and it’s all rooted in leadership and clarity and culture,’ Miller said. ‘From Day 1, I explained my vision and my standard and the roles to people. And so I think when they know what to expect and they feel valued, then they can commit to a purpose. And so we built trust early.’

Miller added eight players through the portal, including her entire starting lineup — sophomore Heloisa Carrera (Ole Miss), junior McKinna Brakens (UNLV) and seniors Gabby Elliott (Penn State), Last-Tear Poa (LSU) and Marley Washenitz (Pitt). It’s an experienced group that combined for 213 starts at the D-I level heading into the season. Elliott leads the Sun Devils in scoring with a career-high 16.3 points in her fourth program in six years.

‘(Elliot) has experience at this level and she’s got poise,’ Miller said. ‘She raises the competitiveness in practice, because she is a good basketball player, but she also expects a lot out of herself. She leads by example in that she is really wanting to make this last year her best year, because she has had a few stops.

‘She’s a go-to player for us. She wants the ball in her hands and we want it in her hands.’ 

Miller’s Arizona State’s roster can be compares favorably to coach Mark Campbell’s TCU squad. He took the Horned Frogs to the Elite Eight for the first time in program history with transfer portal additions last season. Arizona State lost to TCU in early January, only one of two losses for the Sun Devils this season, but Campbell praised Miller’s effort and said her team has a ‘legit shot to be a NCAA Tournament team.’

‘It is so hard to take a program that’s at ground zero and you dive into the portal,’ Campbell said. ‘To get a team to play together and compete together and share the ball, is really, really hard to do. And their staff and Coach Miller is doing a phenomenal job. I don’t think people understand how impressive it is what they’re doing. … They are gong to continue to be a tough out.’

Defensive identity

Arizona State’s identity is rooted in ‘defensive consistency,’ Miller said, which has put a team picked to finish 11th out of 16 teams in the Big 12 preseason poll on everyone’s radar. The Sun Devils are holding opponents to 57.1 points a game and averaging 10.68 steals, which both rank fourth in the Big 12.

‘This team, out of any team I’ve ever coached, probably grew the closest, the quickest. So I’m really proud of, from an X’s and O’s, just the defensive consistency and buy-in, because I’m convicted to that side of the ball,’ Miller said. ‘The way this group has come together and bought into the defense, that’s been really special.’

Washenitz, who’s having an efficient season with a career-best 37.5 field goal percentage, said she was instantly attracted to Miller’s vision of building a program around relentless defensive pressure.

‘I’ve always been a defensive-minded person, and so to be able to play in Coach Molly’s system where she loves defense has been really awesome,’ Washenitz told USA TODAY Sports. ‘That was one of my things when I went into the portal. I want to go to a program that’s going to win.’

What’s ahead for Sun Devils

Arizona State is 11-0 at home this season at Desert Financial Arena. The Sun Devils’ ‘defense travels,’ which also makes them dangerous on the road.

‘We kind of have a saying that we always say before the game. It goes, ‘In order to win, you have to hate to lose a little bit more than everybody else,” Washenitz added. ‘So we definitely take that into every game with it.’

The Sun Devils will need that mentality as they gear up for a challenging road trip that includes games against No. 22 West Virginia (15-4, 5-2) and Cincinnati (7-12, 2-5), which beat Audi Crooks and No. 24 Iowa State (14-5, 2-5). A win against West Virginia would be huge for the Sun Devils’ resume. According to USA TODAY Sports’ latest bracketology, Arizona State is on bubble watch as one of the last four teams in.

‘We definitely want to get to the tournament,’ Washenitz said. ‘We want to keep building that resume. To end that drought would mean a lot, because I just wanted to come here and make it better and leave it better than how I found it. And I think if we did that, obviously that’d be a no-brainer of the impact that this team has had on the program.

‘We’ve had made so much history and so much growth from previous years that we haven’t been able to say that’s been done.’

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